Kyrsten Sinema helped turn reliably red Arizona purple. Is it a midterm fluke or a new trend?

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has won the Arizona Senate seat being vacated by Republican Jeff Flake. She won a tight race against Republican Rep. Martha McSally after a slow count of mail-in ballots gave her an insurmountable lead. (Nov. 13)
AP

WASHINGTON – The 2018 midterm elections may not have turned Arizona solidly blue, but they did cast an increasingly purple sheen over what was once reliably Republican red territory.

Nearly a week after Election Day, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema emerged Monday night as the winner in the race for the U.S. Senate over Republican Martha McSally. Democrats also flipped a U.S. House seat in the midterms, giving them the majority in the state’s congressional delegation for the next two years.

"Arizonans rejected what has become far too common in our country: name calling, petty, personal attacks, doing and saying whatever it takes just to get elected. It’s dangerous, and it lessens who we are as a country," Sinema said. "Arizona proved that there is a better way forward. We can work with people who are different than us."

Also on Monday, Kathy Hoffman, another Democrat, was declared the winner of the statewide race for education superintendent. Other undecided statewide races for corporation commissioner and secretary of state showed the Democrats in the lead.

Political analysts see the Democrats’ gains as a sure sign the state that produced far-right conservative politicians such as former Gov. Jan Brewer and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio now stands firmly in the competitive column.

“Arizona is officially purple,” said Jennifer Duffy, who follows Senate races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in Washington.

The shift has implications not only for how the state will be governed for the next two years, but for the 2020 presidential election and beyond.

“It looks like Arizona is going to be a battleground state in 2020,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of the nonpartisan newsletter Inside Elections.

Sinema's win marks the first time the Grand Canyon State has voted to send a Democrat to the Senate since 1988.

In Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District, Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick, a former three-term congresswoman, defeated Republican Lea Marquez Peterson last Tuesday to win the House seat that McSally vacated to run for Senate. Kirkpatrick’s victory gives Democrats a 5-4 advantage in the congressional delegation for the first time since 2012.

One bright spot for Republicans was the governor’s race, where GOP incumbent Doug Ducey defeated Democrat David Garcia to win a second term.

Brett Johnson (center), an attorney for the Arizona Republicans, talks with Kory Langhofer (right), an attorney for the Arizona Republican Party during a hearing in Maricopa County Superior Judge Margaret Mahoney's courtroom in Phoenix on Nov. 9, 2018. Mark Henle/The Republic

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Given those election results, it’s a safe bet that Arizona will be in play in 2020 when President Donald Trump – who won the state by less than 4 percentage points – will be up for re-election and Democrats and Republicans will battle again for control of Congress, Duffy said.

For Democrats, “this is a state of potential new gains,” she said. “Are they going to gain everywhere? Are they going to hold all nine seats in the (congressional) delegation? No. Not certainly in the foreseeable future. Let’s see what happens when they redraw (congressional) lines.”

Democrats and Republicans in Arizona will be eyeing another Senate race in two years, when there will be a special election for the remaining two years of the seat held for more than three decades by Republican John McCain until his death last August. Two years later, in 2022, that seat will be on the ballot again for a full six-year term, along with another race for governor.

Still, Gonzales urged caution in extrapolating results from the midterm election onto the next presidential race. At the same time, “it would be a mistake to dismiss the 2018 elections out of hand,” he said.

In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win Orange County, California, since 1936. While it would have been easy to dismiss her performance as an aberration, Gonzales said, it may have been the beginning of a trend. The vote count is still underway, but after last week’s midterms, Democrats could end up representing five of the seven congressional districts that take in all or parts of Orange County.

Gonzales said it’s too soon to know whether the Democrats’ gains in Arizona signal a shift in voting trends in their favor.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’m open-minded to that possibility, but just not sure. In order to have a trend, we need multiple cycles. I don’t think we’re going to know whether 2018 is a trend until we’re in 2020.”

Several factors helped Democrats turn Arizona from a reliably red state to one that is now competitive, said Bruce Oppenheimer, who studies elections as a political scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Democrats have benefited from the state’s growing Latino vote, he said, while older voters are being replaced by younger votes who hold different attitudes about political issues. An influx of new residents also has moved into the state, bringing with them diverse backgrounds and views that are not in sync with conservative Republican ideology, Oppenheimer said.

“You’ve got a real interesting state to study,” he said.

While Arizona no longer favors the GOP as heavily as it once did, it’s still a Republican state, Oppenheimer said.

But now, “it’s not something where Democrats write it off and Republicans take it for granted,” he said.